A few years ago there was a company called GrandCentral that created a virtual phone number service. Everything sounded great. The features were interesting and the service was free to everyone that was invited. The problem was that they remained dormant without a word for almost two years after Google purchased them.

The concept was simple. You get one phone number to hand out to everyone. Whenever someone calls that number, it rings on every telephone you have set up on the service. With one unified phone number and voicemail, the service is made to consolidate you home, office, cell and VoIP phone into one cohesive solution for you.

Fast forward to just a few months ago when Google finally reveals the new and improved GrandCentral, now called Google Voice. I’ll let the nice lady from Google explain.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Q9MJdT5Ds]

This has been a blessing for me as I search for work. Because I lowered my minutes on my cellphone plan in an attempt to save money, I can now have Google Voice forward my calls to my Magic Jack VoIP number while I am at home.

ProTip: One day I was on the phone with a friend and needed to leave the house for an errand. If you hit * Google Voice will ring your other phones and you can transfer from one phone to another. I was able to transfer from my Magic Jack phone to my iPhone and the caller never noticed. Sadly this only works for incoming calls.

Example of voice mail transcription.

Google Voice brings along with it a whole suite of features that are both useful and much welcomed. Voice mails are sent to SMS and email. Emails include an audio attachment and text transcription. Sadly, the voice recognition seems to have trouble with all the various accents we have here in South Florida. More often than I had hoped, I find myself listening to the voicemail to figure out what the caller really wanted to say. Are you finding similar issues with the voice mail transcription? Let us know in the comments. Another bonus is that the GMail team added a new GMail lab feature where you can listen to the voicemail within GMail. This removes the need of loading up the Google Voice site.

Google Voice integration into GMail.

The next few features are, what I believe are the most useful and least used. Conference calling is extremely simple to use. If you are already on a call, all you need to do is hit 5 to join the incoming call with the original call. This also only seems to work with incoming calls. Call Recording is another very useful feature that is easy to enable; just hit 4 and the call starts recording. But once again we find this feature has limitations. You can only record calls you receive on your Google Voice number. You can’t record calls you initiate using the  Click2Call from the Google Voice website or the Return Call feature from your voicemail. Notice a pattern? Many of the great features of Google Voice only work when the call is incoming. Why? I don’t know, but that’s the way it is. Hopefully this will change in the future.

GV Mobile brings the power of Google Voice to your iPhone.

Do you have a Blackberry or Android phone? Then grab the Google Voice app for your phone. It integrated GVoice into your phone and makes things much better. Now, are you like me and have an iPhone? Well you have two options. Use the really bad Google Voice mobile site or jailbreak your phone and get GV Mobile. Apple has seen fit, to completely remove any meaningful way of using GVoice on the iPhone. I’ll leave the venting for others but needless to say, it’s a extremely stupid thing to do with a weak ass excuse. If you haven’t Jailbroken your iPhone yet, I’ll cover that in a future article. GV Mobile also suffers from being slow and unpolished, due to the beta nature. With time we should see some polish delivered, but it just doesn’t compared to what you get on an Android phone. Hopefully the new Motorola Android phone will offer what I want so I can switch. Apple and AT&T have driven a very loyal, and life long customer away from them.

There are some weaknesses to GVoice that myself and others have noticed. If you only have one phone, say a only a cellphone like many do, then GVoice may not be worth it for you. Before I started using multiple phones, GVoice’s only use was for free SMS, and voicemail transcriptions. You also can not stop text messages from being forwarded.

This is just the beginning of something wonderful.

So in the end we are one step closer to turning telecoms into dumb pipes much like ISP’s are today. I’m sure this terrifies them as their current model is a combination of content delivery and access.

Still have more questions about Google Voice? Leave a comment or visit this site for videos on every aspect.